Read (Some of) Your Own Books on Kindle for iPad

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Read (Some of) Your Own Books on Kindle for iPad

You can now add your own ebooks to Amazon's Kindle App on iOS devices, as well as books from Project Gutenberg and other copyright-free sources. Great news, right? Not so fast.

The release notes for the iPad and iPhone app contains this line:

Access millions of free and out-of-copyright books from Project Gutenberg, Internet Archive, and other online sources. Open supported files from Safari and Mail or use File Sharing in iTunes to transfer files to your Kindle app. [emphasis added]

That makes it sound like you can load up your EPUB-format books, right? Or at the very least a range of "supported formats", given the wording. The problem is that you can only use Kindle files, so just dropping in all those EPUBs you've relucantly been keeping in iBooks isn't possible.

And the addition of all those free Gutenberg texts? These are exactly the same texts that have always been available to the hardware Kindle, formatted for the device. You'll need to download them and transfer them yourself, either via email or using iTunes Sharing.

And talking of iTunes, the Kindle app will let you drag anything and everything in there, including PDFs and EPUBs, although these aren't actually recognised by the Kindle app.

So it seems that the only big new feature is iTunes transfers, and the ability to open Kindle-format files from emails. You also get a few tweaks. The icon has been uglified with orange text, and the icon view of your library (the "Home" section) now has much bigger thumbnails for your books. The problem here is that they still use the same artwork, scaled up and therefore rather blurry. The app also adds multi-tasking, and can continue to download a book when you quit it.

Finally, here's a workaround to get your own books into the Kindle app. Grab a copy of the (free) software Calibre, which manages ebooks. Drop in your EPUBS, or whatever you have, and convert them to MOBI format. They will now work on the Kindle.